16/06/2014

June GSF Update

The other day I achieved mastery of my second ship in GSF - the Warcarrier bomber. While a nice achievement, this also left me feeling a bit aimless. One thing I've really come to enjoy about GSF is that feeling of slowly gaining enough ship requisition to become as powerful as possible. But where do you go once you've fully mastered your ship? Sure, you can spend spare requisition on maxing out other components, whether you actually plan on using them or not, but that's not nearly as exciting.

Working on my default scout and strike fighter wasn't really an option, as I just don't have the twitch skills to use them effectively. So I finally gave in and bought a new gunship: the newly released SGS-S1 Condor, the first gunship to also have missiles.

A gunship with missiles is actually something that I thought I'd like long before Bioware announced this release. Personally I would prefer them to work a bit differently than they do though: I would have the missiles replace the lasers as primary weapons. Sure, that would leave the ship quite vulnerable in some situations, but I'm rubbish with the lasers anyway, and at least that way it would be easy to swap between missiles and the railgun. The way the Condor works, I have to remember to swap secondary weapons if I go from long range to close range combat, and that just feels a bit clunky to me. Still, I figured that this is about as close to my vision as I'm likely to get, so I bought it.

The problem I have right now is that starting from scratch actually feels quite painful. It's not so much the fact that my brand new gunship is weak and squishy... though I won't claim that that's particularly fun either. However, I've previously hopped into the occasional GSF match on an alt and not minded my weakness there - because it's not as if I had a choice. The problem I have with the Condor right now is that to earn any requisition with it beyond the global reward you get from doing the daily and weekly missions, I have to make a conscious choice to fly into battle with the knowledge that I'll be under-performing, and this makes me feel bad. Surely I'm letting the team down if I'm putzing around on my dinky gunship when I could be flying my mastered one, put out more damage and die less? It's particularly bad in deathmatches, where I like to fly my gunship. (I generally prefer to take my bomber to domination matches anyway.) As it stands, I'll usually start in my Condor and if the game looks like an easy win I'll stay there, but if it looks like we seriously have to fight for it I sooner or later find myself switching to one of my mastered ships in hopes of making more of a difference.

How do other GSF players deal with having a new ship in their line-up that's incredibly weak when you're just starting out?

5 comments
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I use extra req to buy new components and try them out. Even if suboptimal, it can still be a lot of fun. I play the comet breaker gunship with double missiles, and still outperform most people. I may get one or two less kills, but it's fun and keeps me coming back. Players see the comet breaker and think I'm a free kill. Then they take a proton torpedo, followed by a thermite, followed by a rez timer. Take advantage of the meta and surprise people!

The new gunship (or hotdog as some call it) can be really strong. Don't worry about holding your team back. Everyone has flown unmastered ships at some point, and now it's your turn. Kill-Death ratio is what's important in deathmatch. Not kills or damage. If you can keep your KDR at 1 or more, you're not hurting your team. Even if you do really poorly, the experience gained is worth more than the XP, req, or credits combined. Lose a battle, but win the war kinda thing. If I think I can win a game only by switching ships, I'll do it. Otherwise, I'm sticking with a new ship to get the req and experience.

Usually I'll sidestep the issue a little bit by buying a ship before using all the daily/weekly req bonuses, since they apply to every ship you own. While you're maxing out one ship, you're boosting your new one a bit.

But even without that, honestly, you can do pretty good even in a 100% starter ship if you know what you're doing. I've still topped one or more categories in a mostly-new scout or starfighter, and I've seen other people do it too. So I don't feel that the hamstringing is big enough to impact the team and ruin everyone's fun/win.

I'm just not that good honestly, and I find that I die a lot more with my newbie gunship, as other gunships can blow me up in nearly a single hit, and I only have very limited ways of evading missile locks. It does feel like it makes a very noticeable difference compared to my Quarrel.

Having the ship "mastered" does not mean you can't improve further. I mastered my Star Guard back in February or so (and am generally considered one of the strike aces on my server), and only in the past month have certain things about it clicked for me, to the point that I can suddenly reliably hunt and kill ships and pilots I never could solo before.

Mastering the ship according to the game is just the starting point. It just puts you at the maximum base potential. There's still a lot to be learned about actually flying it.

And I should add that starting from scratch with a new ship isn't painful for me. A huge part of learning to fly these ships is learning what you can get away with and what your margins of error are, and how much of that margin derives from your upgrades as opposed to how you are actually flying it. Once you understand that you can do the same sorts of things in a near-stock ship that you could in a mastered one. There are a very few builds that depend critically on a certain upgrade level, but they're exceptions. Most strikes and bombers in particular will fly practically the same with hardly any upgrades as with maxed upgrades.

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